Si-Chi Chin is a visual person who looks at life through her own unique lens.

As an informatics scholar, she is focusing on Wikipedia vandalism, exhibiting a keen eye for inaccurate photographs and incorrect, misleading, and bizarre facts in page entries.

During her free time, this graduate student from Taipei, Taiwan, is constantly on the lookout for things like strange corners or ceilings – objects people don’t normally zoom in on – as potential photo opportunities.

“Photography captures the feeling I had at that particular moment,” said Chin, an amateur photographer. “I’m a visual person, and even in my research I need a lot of pictures. I learn from how I see things.”

A few years ago, Chin visited the Wikipedia page devoted to former President Abraham Lincoln and saw a picture of comic book superhero, Batman. That act of vandalism prompted Chin to think about how to help page managers who monitor edits to entries, a tedious task for a website that allows anyone to make changes to any page.

Page managers use existing tools that help spot potential vandalism. These tools are built manually, however, with prohibited words and phrases entered by hand, and are time-consuming for managers to use and easy for vandals to evade.

Chin, UI Professors Nick Street and Padmini Srinivasan, and UI Associate Professor Dave Eichmann are developing an algorithm that uses a statistical language model to check new edits to a page and compare them to words in the rest of the entry. The page manager is alerted if something doesn’t seem right.

“It’s going to save people a lot of time and is going to push up whatever is more likely to be vandalism, so you don’t have to review every new revision,” said Chin, who points out there are technical issues that need to be addressed before the algorithm can become a live application that benefits Wikipedia page managers.

When she’s not sitting at a computer, Chin is on the lookout, camera in hand, for the firefly – a legendary and unseen insect in her native city. She actually photographed fireflies at the Iowa City Jazz Festival one summer.

“It’s some romantic idea with fireflies in Taipei,” Chin said. “If people mention their evening experience, fireflies would be in there. It’s almost like a fairytale type of romance. The first time I saw one, I couldn’t believe it.”

The firefly even has its own Wikipedia page.